@Yair_Rosenberg apparently, antivaccine activists are flaunting a yellow star and comparing themselves to holocaust victims at this point. pic.twitter.com/HQNzZGJfXl
— (((Dorit Reiss))) (@doritmi) March 29, 2019
When we talk about the anti-vaccine movement, we often discuss the clinical impact—the deadly danger that vaccine-preventable diseases pose to the unvaccinated or the immunocompromised. But the vaccine hesitancy also has a large shared financial cost https://t.co/iXU8836meq 1/
— WIRED (@WIRED) March 29, 2019
From the reliably excellent Maryn McKenna, at Wired:
… Every grave illness and death is an individual tragedy, but the cost of vaccine hesitancy also enforces a shared public toll.
Consider the ongoing measles outbreak in Washington State, which is centered in Clark County, on the Oregon border. In January, when it had racked up 26 cases, the state governor declared a public health emergency. Since then, the case count has almost tripled, to 74.
To figure out who might have been put at risk, the state health department has interviewed 4,652 people and closely monitored 812 of them. It has reassigned staff from across its divisions, borrowed public health workers from other states, sent people who would normally be at desks out into the field, performed hundreds of lab tests that would not normally be necessary. So far, it has spent $1.6 million…
The funding to support that work isn’t being conjured out of the air. It’s coming from the budgets of public agencies, which have already been facing years of cuts and have no secret stashes of discretionary money to spend.
“There are substantial public health responses that go into mitigating an outbreak, and we should pursue those, because they prevent larger outbreaks or broader social disruption,” says Saad Omer, a physician and epidemiologist at Emory University and the senior author of a recent paper on the “true cost” of measles outbreaks. “But it does result in a lot of costs that can be pretty substantial. And we don’t measure the further indirect costs to the community.”
In Washington State, those indirect costs include the other work that doesn’t get done while the outbreak proceeds. The state health department was forced to appropriate a portion of its poison control center’s work hours to handle the calls made by people worried they had been exposed to measles. In Clark County, the local health department reassigned to measles the home-visit nurses who take care of risky pregnancies, and also the investigators who track down victims of sexually transmitted diseases and foodborne illnesses…
Those costs are being paid by state governments, and by federal agencies such as the CDC that give states grants and loan them personnel. State and federal budgets are public money—which means those necessary bills for unnecessary outbreaks are being paid by all of us. The toll of illness may be confined to individuals, but the cost of responding to outbreaks related to vaccine refusal is a bill that we are all being compelled to pay.
And you know the privileged parents now telling each other, Really, it’s only measles, we all got them back in the day and *I* never had any problems will sue everyone from the suspected source to their local government to the FDA if their little darling has to so much as miss a school recital or family vacation because of a quarantine, too. Mah RIGHTS!!!
Sometimes I find myself wishing that this kind of stupidity physically hurt its possessors, and not just their victims, because that seems to be the only way to reach some people.